Entries Tagged 'Blogs' ↓
July 2nd, 2008 — Blogs, Chattanooga, Design
Today I am thrilled to announce the launch of Chattarati, a collaborative Chattanooga news and opinion blog. We’re going to be “blogging everything we love and hate about Chattanooga.”
Chattarati began as a small idea I had several months ago for a daily photoblog to chronicle Chattanooga’s evolving downtown. After much discussion and planning with other local bloggers, the idea grew and evolved into a full-blown hyperlocal news and opinion blog in the vein of Gothamist or, closer to home, Nashvillest.
Chattarati is being published by a great team who have all put in a tremendous amount of work to pursue our goal of not only creating a great Chattanooga-centric blog, but becoming a vital part of the flourishing blog community in our city. I’m honored to have such great minds collaborating on this project, and we have loads of compelling content planned to inform–and entertain–our fellow Chattanoogans.
Naturally, we’ve gone through the social networking checklist and integrated everything from multiple Twitter feeds to an Alltop-inspired RSS aggregator to a Flickr pool and Facebook group.
If you live in or love Chattanooga, I hope you’ll check out Chattarati.
Oh, and yes… I did design the bold, classy logo and stylish web site. Thanks for asking!
June 26th, 2008 — Blogs, Design, Photos, iPhone
Hyperlocal Blogging
SEO consultant Matt McGee discusses the growing trend of “hyperlocal” blogs. He mentions the big names like Gothamist, but surprisingly left out a number of localized blogging communities like the Chattanooga-founded Terrablogs, which has been around for years. Coincidentally (or not), I’ll be announcing an exciting new group adventure into this space in just a few days. Stay tuned!
Can Android Vanquish the iPhone?
In a word, no. Seriously, though, Business Week is asking the question. Fair enough, but the fact is that Android is just a software platform at this point. There is no “gPhone” and there probably won’t be a handset manufactured by Google. Perhaps one of the big handset makers will take Android and do something great with it, but I don’t expect any Android phone to be as big a hit as the iPhone. Apple’s “closed system” — which is often lamented by that same crowd waiting for Android — is what makes their products successful and beloved. They control the user experience more than anyone else in this space, and they are the hands-down experts.
Sketch Notes
If you, like me, missed the SEED 3 conference put on by 37Signals, you’ll want to check out these incredible sketch notes from the event. There’s also a great profile of the conference in the Chicago Reader. I’m still processing the vast amounts of info and insights…
Summer on Prince Edward Island
Chattanooga may be the “scenic city,” but PEI looks absolutely gorgeous. I suppose Dan deserves summer vistas like this after enduring the frigid Canadian winter.
June 4th, 2008 — Blogs, Culture, Design, Internet
I’m speechless. This must be a joke: Are You Generic? It’s straight out of the Stuff White People Like playbook — hating corporations and loving t-shirts. (hat tip: Guy Kawasaki)
37Signals tells us why they skip Photoshop when developing a user interface. The reasoning behind their methodology is solid and it certainly supports their focus on usability. On the other hand, it put a spotlight on one of my few complaints about their work: the lack of visual appeal. Clean, user-focused design doesn’t have to look dull, and I’d love to see them bring as much refinement to the aesthetics as they do to the usability.
A high school classmate of mine, Joe Brown, is a locavore blogger who recently traveled to Cuba and explored their local food culture. He also confessed to what many of us have always suspected: “all academics are secretly communist.” Good to know.
And finally, it sure is nice here in Mayberry.
May 25th, 2008 — Blogs, Work
Tim Ferriss and Seth Godin are conspiring to change office life around the world. Well, maybe not, but they both wrote posts this week examining new ideas about what matters in the workplace and what shouldn’t. Seth took the first shot, on Monday, when he wrote about the new standard for meetings and conferences. I can’t put it any more eloquently than this:
If you’re a knowledge worker, your boss shouldn’t make you come to the (expensive) office every day unless there’s something there that makes it worth your trip… It’s hard for me to see why you’d bother having someone come all the way to an office just to sit in a cube and type.
On Thursday, Tim Ferriss started a series of interviews with the geniuses behind Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) initiative. If you’re not familiar with ROWE, get the scoop straight from the creators or read this Business Week article. Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, who created the program, told Tim that ROWE is not only transforming business results at Best Buy, but also the personal lives of their employees:
Six months after teams go live, they are asked how much more productive they perceive they are on a scale of 0-100%. Then managers are asked how much more productive the team is according to actual business results. If perception and reality match, that’s a winner. Under this model, ROWE teams show an average increase in productivity of 41%. It makes sense.
On the personal side, ROWE has transformed people’s lives. We’ve heard stories about ROWE saving marriages, allowing people to be better parents (and opened the door for some to actually be parents), get in shape and give back to their community.
In part two of the interview, they encourage readers to start thinking about what it would be like to truly control their own time:
At 4:00 p.m. on a sunny Friday, your boss lets you leave early. Goody, right? Wrong. This is a school kid’s view of time, not an adult’s. If you’re getting your work done, then why should someone have the right to tell you where to be?
Indeed. I count myself as a knowledge worker. I don’t believe that I was hired because I could fill a cubicle for 40 hours a week, but rather because I have a certain base of knowledge and can provide insight and new ideas, think critically and help accomplish business goals. ROWE should be perfect for people like me. However, I can’t imagine ideas like that capturing the minds of mainstream corporate management.
What do you think? Can you imagine ROWE ever working in your company?
May 7th, 2008 — Blogs, Links, iPhone
My high school roommate (seriously… that was over a decade ago?) Raman has a funny post about his daily desktop architecture projects. I have some catching up to do in the stylish cubicle department. In other Raman news, he has finally succumbed to Twitter.
The always interesting Seth Godin encourages the New York Times, and all of us, to “do what you’re great at.” It’s a simple, but often ignored, branding concept. It’s much easier to expand, expand, expand than to maintain a tight focus. I love his two suggested opportunities for the Times to excel at: what is true, and what is important. He puts it best when he says that there is “Lots of noise online, not so much truth.” I’m tucking those two away for an upcoming collaborative blog project.
Finally, did a leaked AT&T email reveal the launch timeframe for the 3G iPhone? And, should I be getting my Apple news from Fake Steve Jobs? Well, he’s a heck of a lot more entertaining than the dedicated Apple rumor blogs. Just look at this post about “the Hildebeast” bowing out.
May 6th, 2008 — Blogs, Links, Web Analytics
Paths Forward is my new recurring series featuring interesting links and stories from around the web. Woohoo! Let’s get started:
The Accuracy of Web Analytics (Marketing Pilgrim) takes a look at research on whether you should implement your JavaScript tag at the top or bottom of your page source, depending on the load time of your page. It’s interesting, and I’m all for greater accuracy in measurement, but I can’t help referring you to Accuracy or Precision, which is jump-started from Jim Novo’s theory that precision (repeatable and reproducible) is more important than accuracy (error-prone and doubtful). I happen to agree. Web analytics data isn’t 100% perfect, but if you can generally expect it to be imperfect in the same ways, so you should be able to derive the actionable insights you need.
Penelope Trunk shares Research That Reveals News Paths to Productivity. The most interesting to me was the suggestion to “stop obsessing over your choices and just decide” since most people tend to overestimate the regret we’ll feel after an emotionally involved choice.
The Dieline has a great post on Sennheiser Eco-Friendly Packaging. It’s a couple weeks old, but I was really excited about it for a couple of reasons. One, it’s consumer electronics, and that’s the industry I spent two years in doing graphic design, including packaging, among other things. The second reason is that as much as I love The Dieline, they seem to focus primarily on food and health/beauty products. It was great to see a change of pace.
Finally, Get Rich Slowly has a post on Personal Currencies. My personal currency for many months was, of course, the iPhone. That is, until my lovely wife bought me one as a “Christmas/Birthday/Anniversary” gift.
April 3rd, 2008 — Blogs, Music
This might be the most exciting sentence I’ve read in recent memory:
“In about a week I will load up my car with amplifiers and guitars and drive to Nashville to begin recording my next record.”
This is from a recent NYT blog post by none other than Andrew Bird, who created one of my favorite albums of 2007. Armchair Apocrypha was astoundingly good, and it sounds like he’s got some interesting songs lined up for this next project.
If you ever get a chance to see Andrew Bird live, do not miss it. A friend and I caught him at 3rd & Lindsley a couple years back, playing a Lightning 100 radio show with Over the Rhine, and I was truly impressed. It was really interesting to watch this obvious introvert who somehow managed to have an almost frantic energy and stage presence. It might have had a bit to do with his unique ability to play the violin and guitar in the same song…
March 25th, 2008 — Blogs
I’m a little late to the party on this one, but Stuff White People Like is absolutely hilarious. It’s basically a send-up of pretentious intellectual/cultural elitists, and it’s funny because it’s true. According to NPR (ironically enough, #44 on the list of things white people like), Stuff White People Like has caused a bit of controversy. But in an LA Times article about the blog, author Christian Lander had this to say:
“I’m writing about the white people who think they’re absolutely unique and individual,” Lander told me. “I’m calling them out and poking fun of myself. The things I post are all the things I like too!”
The full list of Stuff White People Like is up to 91 entries, and I’m guilty of a whopping 64! Here are a few of my particular favorites:
